Since news of Michael Jackson's passing, there has been an
emotional outpouring not seen perhaps since Princess Diana's death
in 1997.

The 24-hour news cycle and social media are probably amplifying
the reaction. But the response seems genuinely broad and intense –
which may be surprising given the pop star's transformation into
something of a bizarre and controversial recluse in his last 20
years.

If the death of a pop star was to be measured by tweets alone,
Michael Jackson's would seem to be of monumental importance. About
15 percent of Twitter posts mentioned Jackson when the news broke
Thursday evening, noted Harvard researcher Ethan Zuckerman in one
tweet, comparing that with hot topics such as Iran and swine flu
that never crossed 5 percent.

By Friday afternoon, 9 of the top 10 albums selling on iTunes
were Michael Jackson's, Amazon.com
had sold out all his CDs, and major retailers coast to coast were
running out of his music. Online, Facebook and news websites were
swamped with tributes. And Fans gathered across the world, from a
mass moonwalk in London to tributes on the Walk of Fame in Los
Angeles to vigils in Paris and Tokyo.

The overriding reason is his extraordinary musical
influence.

"The reason you are seeing this global outpouring of interest is
that Michael Jackson is singular in the history of pop culture. No
one even comes close," says Professor James Peterson at Bucknell
University in Lewisburg, Pa., who teaches hip-hop culture,
African-American literature, and sociolinguistics. Mr. Peterson
points out that Jackson's achievement of 750 million in global
album sales will never again be equaled because of the absolute
change in the music business caused by the Internet.

Besides having had a dramatic influence on such artists as
Usher, Chris Brown, and Justin Timberlake, Jackson "at once
captures and encapsulates the history of blacks in dance. Any
number of popular artists could not exist at the level they have
without Michael Jackson," says Mr. Peterson.

For some, Jackson's body of work may trump all the other
questionable aspects of his lifestyle – the child molestation
charges, facial alteration, and reclusiveness.

"There have been at least three generations of listeners — one
for each of his musical incarnations," Peterson notes, adding that
he has a 10-year-old son who is now getting immersed in Jackson
watching Peterson and his wife in mourning. "A fourth generation of
followers is going to emerge because of this," he says.

Jackson was also one of the few musicians to transcend narrow
ideas about how a black man should look and act and reach a global
audience, says Professor Jeff Melnick, who teaches African American
studies and popular culture at Babson College in Wellesley,
Mass.

But the intense response to Jackson's death also reveals
society's deep investment in celebrity culture worldwide, he says,
adding that there is an acknowledgement that the demands of
celebrity culture wounded Jackson from the moment he hit the scene
as a boy in the late 1960s.

"The outpouring is partly guilt, then — it is a confession of
sorts," says Mr. Melnick, "of the culpability of the fan in the
premature death of the artist."

With virtually no offstage in his life, "Jackson became a canvas
on which fans projected all kinds of fantasies – about proper
gender behavior, about racial norms and what we should do with our
bodies."

Jackson also gave more than $300 million over the course of his
life to charities all over the world, which may have something to
do with tributes coming from several world leaders, from Britain's
Gordon Brown to former president of South Korea Kim Dae-jung and
South Africa's Nelson Mandela.

Other cultural anthropologists and researchers suggest the
current economic downturn has accelerated global notions of
nostalgia.

"We mourn the loss of ourselves through this pop icon," says
Tracy Johnson, Research Director of Context-Based Research Group
which studies consumer behavior.

"We recognize that we, particularly in America, have lost a
little bit of what we were all about," she says. "Someone like
Michael Jackson who so embodied the American Dream just makes that
loss all that much more palpable."

Above all, it was his music and unique, energetic performance
style that attracted fans around the world.

"One reason Michael Jackson's death is having such a wide impact
is because his music had such a wide, and even sustained impact,"
says John Covach, a music historian at the University of Rochester.
"Few artists have so completely saturated the market as Jackson did
during the 1980s. It's comparable to the Beatles in the 60s or
Elvis in the 50s. When an artist or performer is so well known and
loved, the reaction to his or her passing is bound to be strong and
widespread."

"One important difference between Jackson's career and those of
many others is that he was a child star who became an adult star –
a very difficult transition to pull off," says Professor Covach.
"Even those who were too young to be fans of Jackson when he was a
child have seen the clips of him performing with a mastery far
beyond his years. The adult Michael Jackson that fans loved in the
1980s thus already had a bit of history — people felt like they
knew him already."